Soon, the battle raged on across every front, chaotic, unrelenting, and deafening.
Yet Ryusei couldn't feel optimistic. Not yet.
Yes, his and Tsunade's combined long-term chakra reserves, with Katsuyu constantly redistributing energy through her fragments, were immense.
Their combined network could sustain their side for many hours if necessary, even with the Edo Tensei deliberately turning the fight into a war of attrition, forcing them to burn through far more chakra than usual just to keep up.
But even that paled before the reality of Edo Tensei opponents.
They had infinite chakra.
The resurrected shinobi didn't tire, didn't weaken, and could spam technique after technique endlessly, their purpose clear: to exhaust the living.
Eventually, no matter how much chakra Tsunade and he poured in, they would run dry, long before the Edo Tensei ever did.
The only true counter was sealing.
But sealing Edo Tensei wasn't like binding a normal shinobi.
It demanded mastery of high-level fūinjutsu, precise timing, and concentrated chakra control.
Ryusei and Ashina both had that skill, but their current opponents were too powerful and relentless to allow such an opening.
Fūinjutsu wasn't something you simply threw mid-fight; it required moments of stability, focus, and control.
The rest of the team lacked the expertise for it.
Ryusei considered flooding the field with shadow clones, overwhelming the summons and forcing sealing opportunities through sheer numbers.
But that plan fell apart almost as quickly as it came.
Danzo could then simply reabsorb his Edo Tensei, re-summon them instantly, and reset the entire battle, all while Ryusei's clones burned through his chakra reserves for nothing.
No, the only way to truly seal them was to strike during a moment when Danzo's focus was elsewhere, when he couldn't react or recall them, and when the Edo Tensei themselves were sufficiently weakened.
Coordinating that across such a chaotic field was nearly impossible.
Still, Ryusei's mind kept racing, searching for that one domino effect—a single cascade point where the balance would tip in their favor.
Maybe Orochimaru would arrive.
Maybe Fugaku did something.
Anything could shift the scale.
For now, though, he had to create that chance himself.
His eyes tracked Sakumo through the drifting smoke and dust, watching the subtle rhythm of his chakra, steady, precise, and now unmistakably his own.
The man had now regained full awareness and control, freed partially from Danzo's grasp as the old man's attention and chakra were drawn elsewhere, struggling to contain Kiyomi's rapidly expanding power.
"This might be it," Ryusei thought.
Ryusei sidestepped another silver flash, the heat of his chakra hissing against Sakumo's blade. "You really never learn, do you?" he said lightly, voice carrying through the haze.
"Even after death, still the Hokage's loyal dog. Still barking when they tell you to."
Sakumo's sword paused mid-swing for just a heartbeat.
His expression didn't change, but the motion faltered—barely perceptible, yet there.
Ryusei's slit-eyed smile widened. "What's the point, Hatake? Even now, you dance on strings for the same men who drove you to die. Or did you forget how they thanked you for saving your comrades? Those same people who called you a hero one day and a disgrace the next."
Sakumo's jaw clenched.
"You think the rumors just appeared out of thin air?" Ryusei continued, voice sharpening.
"You think the people of Konoha suddenly decided you were trash for those foolish reasons? No. That was Hiruzen's system at work. Danzo's whispers. Your 'superiors' made sure your name burned while theirs stayed clean."
The air between them crackled with tension.
Sakumo swung again, sharper, faster, but his eyes flickered, just for an instant.
"You served them so faithfully," Ryusei pressed, ducking under a blade of lightning. "And when they were done with you, they threw you to the dogs. And what did you do?"
He stopped blocking, letting the last blow scrape across his shoulder as he stared straight into Sakumo's face. "You folded. You took their guilt and wore it yourself. You killed yourself for their sins. Some 'legend.' you are, indeed."
Sakumo's strikes slowed.
For a brief second, his gaze drifted, not toward Ryusei, but somewhere distant, inward.
"I protected the Leaf," he muttered hoarsely, almost to himself. "It was… my duty."
"Duty?" Ryusei's tone softened mockingly, almost pityingly. "Tell me, does duty mean dying for their lies? Killing people you never even understood because the Hokage said so? You don't even know who I am, or why they sent you after me, for example, yet you bark here."
Sakumo's breathing grew heavier.
His strikes became erratic, his chakra flickering like an unstable flame.
The edge of his blade wavered mid-swing.
Inside his fractured mind, faint memories stirred—faces, laughter, the weight of comrades he couldn't save, the accusations that followed.
A small voice whispered that maybe… maybe the boy wasn't wrong.
But before the doubt could take form, Ryusei saw the opening.
He flashed through seals, gathering boiling chakra in his palm, molding it into the spectral form of a dragon coiled in light and seal markings.
It was an advanced fuinjutsu taught to him by Ashina, but refined by Ryusei's own sealing theory, including all the information he had regarding Edo Tensei in specific—designed to bind reanimated souls directly through their chakra residue, forcing them into stillness.
The spectral construct lunged forward.
Sakumo's eyes suddenly changed.
The flicker of doubt vanished, replaced by something cold and utterly indifferent, almost too mechanical.
The pupils shrank to pinpoints—flat, lifeless.
Without warning, his sword erupted in blinding light.
A massive arc of energy slashed through the air, splitting the seal dragon clean in half and cutting through Ryusei's chest in the same instant.
Ryusei's body bent backward, blood erupting, the wound wide enough to nearly cleave him apart.
For a brief moment, he felt heat, pain, and then the instant familiar rush of his advanced Creation Rebirth healing him automatically, through his vast reserves of Yin Seal chakra.
He dropped to one knee, hand pressed to the wound as it closed rapidly.
His eyes locked back on Sakumo—expressionless, empty, no trace of that flicker of humanity.
"What… was that?" Ryusei muttered under his breath, scanning the field with his sensory network.
Danzo's chakra was still being suppressed—Kiyomi's new overpowered Mangekyo abilities were disrupting half his control.
There was no way he could have reasserted command so fast.
And yet, Sakumo's entire chakra aura had also changed during that moment.
For those few seconds, it hadn't felt like Danzo's full control—or Sakumo's original will.
It was something else entirely.
Something colder, older… detached.
It hadn't felt human.
A chill went down Ryusei's spine.
The air itself around Sakumo seemed to warp faintly again, his expression now dull and robotic again, his aura clearly looking like he was back under Danzo's standard total Edo Tensei control again, since perhaps he finally reacted to what Ryusei was doing here.
But Ryusei's mind kept replaying that instant—the shift, the unnatural pulse of chakra, the strange emptiness in those eyes.
That hadn't been Danzo's doing.
He straightened slowly, exhaling a plume of steam.
"No," he thought, narrowing his eyes. "That wasn't him. That… was something else."
Whatever it was, it had felt like an entirely different presence had hijacked Sakumo for that one heartbeat—a flicker of some unseen will moving behind the Edo Tensei technique itself.
And Ryusei didn't like that at all.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the battlefield, the clash between Kiyomi and Danzo had reached a terrifying intensity.
Danzo had long abandoned the subtlety he prided himself on.
His cloak was torn, his face marked with burns from residual chakra surges, and his bandaged arm was now exposed, ten Sharingan staring grotesquely from it, twitching with faint light.
Kiyomi stood across from him, her breath measured, her chakra pulsing like a black sun.
Her Susanoo had already taken shape, a towering, fully formed initial humanoid skeleton, and a massive obsidian hammer pulsing with crimson energy veins.
Every step it took cracked the ground beneath it.
For the first time, Kiyomi was moving with complete synchronization with it, each motion seamless, each strike deliberate.
The earlier wild surges of power were gone; her control was sharpening with each exchange.
When Danzo's wind blades cut through the air again, but this time, her Susanoo met them head-on precisely, for the first time, hammer swinging in a broad arc that shattered the projectiles into spiraling dust.
The shockwave alone sent debris flying for dozens of meters.
Danzo's brow furrowed. "Tch… her growth rate is abnormal."
Inside the cockpit of her Susanoo, Kiyomi's Mangekyō spun, its light deepening into something almost ethereal.
Her left eye flared first—Enmetsu.
Oblivion—total decay.
The name came to her instinctively, as if whispered from the depths of her bloodline.
It was chaos given form, a field where order unraveled and everything, chakra, matter, even reason itself, slowly collapsed into nothingness.
Immediately, the world around her shimmered.
The space within a few dozen-meter radius distorted as invisible fractures rippled outward, black cracks crawling through the air like ink veins in water.
The very laws of balance began to unravel, chakra flows twisted unpredictably, metal fragments rusted midair, and the earth itself cracked and shifted.
Danzo's jutsu began to falter.
His next Wind Release collapsed on itself halfway through the seals, detonating prematurely and throwing him off balance.
"What—?" He gritted his teeth, leaping back, only for his kunai to disintegrate mid-flight.
Inside the field, his chakra circulation wavered.
The control that made him so efficient faltered as his body began to deteriorate—microscopic tearing, spiritual instability creeping in.
Kiyomi advanced, her voice calm but cutting. "You stole my clan's eyes," she said coldly. "Now watch what a real Uchiha does with them."
Her right eye flickered—Shōmetsu.
A concentrated touch of entropy itself, wherever her gaze of that eye fell, stability shattered, and existence began to unravel.
In an instant, black cracks appeared across the air like spiderweb fractures.
They raced forward, touching one of Danzo's defensive barriers, and the entire construct disintegrated, as though erased from existence.
Danzo didn't even have time to react before a second wave reached him.
His chest cracked open in a burst of dark energy, the skin turning to ash, then suddenly restoring as one of his implanted eyes closed on his arm.
He reappeared several meters away, panting, glaring at her with barely concealed fury.
"Izanagi," Kiyomi murmured, realization dawning.
She could feel the change in his chakra pattern, the brief flicker of death rewritten into existence again.
"So that's exactly what you've been hiding."
Her voice hardened. "You're using our eyes for this filth."
Danzo's lips tightened. He didn't answer.
Because of her status within the clan, Kiyomi had long been privy to the truth of the Izanagi, one of the Uchiha's most forbidden techniques.
Her grandfather, the Great Elder himself, had taught her about it personally, warning her never to use it unless there was no other choice.
When she first awakened her Mangekyō, she'd been too overwhelmed, her body flooded with new sensations, her mind barely keeping up, to notice how exactly Danzo had revived at the time, and Ryusei perhaps also forgot to linger on it.
But after his arm was exposed in their earlier clash, and now, seeing the process with clear eyes, she recognized it instantly.
The realization hit her like a blade to the chest.
Those Sharingan embedded in his arm… they weren't only some twisted trophies of that gross old man.
They were fuel.
So that was what Root had been doing during the war, hunting down her kin, desecrating their corpses, or perhaps even orchestrating some of those deaths, and then harvesting their eyes like resources.
Her hands tightened, her chakra flaring with fury.
Some of Ryusei's past words echoed sharply in her mind currently. Now, staring at Danzo, she understood more clearly than ever how right he had truly been all along.
The Uchiha and Konoha's current leadership weren't just destined to clash politically anymore; they were bound for a life-or-death struggle that could only end with one side erased.
Her Susanoo's hammer slammed into the ground, the quake shaking the entire field. "You disgust me."
She vanished, reappearing within her Enmetsu field again, her movements smooth and deliberate now.
She layered both abilities, the wide decay field from her left eye destabilizing the terrain, and the concentrated Shōmetsu tearing apart Danzo's counterattacks the moment they formed.
A gust of wind turned to dust midair.
A chain of explosive tags crumbled to powder before igniting.
Every offense he launched collapsed before it reached her.
Danzo's eyes darted across the battlefield.
He'd already burned through a few Izanagi activations just staying alive, and his chakra control was slipping within her entropy field.
Every regeneration cost him not only an eye but also composure.
"This brat…" he hissed. "She's forcing me to waste everything here."
He wasn't just angry at her strength—he was furious at what this fight was exposing.
Hiruzen was watching.
His "hidden" power, his arm full of stolen Uchiha eyes, was no longer a secret.
Kiyomi struck again.
Her Susanoo's hammer descended with a roar, black flames rippling around it.
The impact sent shockwaves tearing through the air, forcing Danzo to activate yet another Izanagi, his form flickering and reappearing to the side.
Kiyomi's Sharingan spun faster, her expression cold and focused. "You can rewrite reality all you want," she said, "but you can't rewrite what you are."
Danzo's teeth ground together, his voice sharp. "I am what the Leaf needs to survive."
"Then maybe it deserves to die," she shot back, her tone like ice.
Her Susanoo swung again—this time with one hand.
The hammer's head detached, floating and spinning in the air, encased in a storm of black energy, and even her fire release this time..
With a snap of her right eye, it shot forward like a dark meteor.
Danzo dodged, barely, but the shockwave erased half the landscape behind him—soil, trees, and stone dissolving into nothingness.
He blinked, realizing too late that his skin was already cracking again. Another eye closed.
"Six left…" he muttered grimly.
Across from him, Kiyomi exhaled slowly, her Susanoo expanding another few meters, its shape refining as if fueled by her growing synchronization.
Her control over Enmetsu was now surgical, the field pulsing rhythmically with her breath.
Her eyes glowed brighter, the left shimmering like collapsing stars, the right like a singularity.
"This ends soon," she said. "I'm done watching parasites like you use our bloodline as tools."
Danzo's face hardened, sweat mixing with dust and blood.
He wasn't just cornered—he was being systematically undone.
And for the first time in years, Danzo Shimura felt something alien creep into his chest. Fear.